Max Ernst - A Mulher 100 Cabeças

Robert Desnos: "Subject to the fate of every poet, Max Ernst thus tears away a piece of the marvelous and restores it to the tattered garment of reality." The poet is a wolf to poetry. He fights it, strips it of its value, and destroys it with bites and long claws. He feeds on it.

Like in the eternal struggle, the relentless combat of lovers, a passion as strong as hatred and death unites and opposes at the same time the poet and his superior ideal. Without this taste for crime and blood, there is no valid work in this domain.

It is this taste for crime, this taste for blood, that characterizes the work of Max Ernst, and especially *The Woman with 100 Heads*; which is, in a way, the sum of his pursuits.

For the poet there are no hallucinations. There is reality. And it is to the spectacle of a reality more extensive than the commonly known one that the inventor of these collages invites us. It is a new domain acquired by memory through imagination, a colony conquered from the freedom of dreams, for the benefit of the imperialism of the "Already Seen."

Because today we will be shown a sufficiently large panorama of an entire unknown of nightmares and visions, to enable us to identify from now on the other views that may be submitted to us and authorize us to say: "This is part of the land of The Woman with 100 Heads."

Where Max Ernst was the first to penetrate; it is situated at an enormous distance from the arrival point of the titans, in the shadow of the ladder that witnessed the flight of the Eternal, not far from the strange grotto where unusual rats amuse themselves, in the territory prerogative of earthquakes and the flexible ascents of balloons, halfway between awakening and twilight, in the land of dreams, lusts, dark horrors, and artificial dawns.

Throughout this entire travel narrative, this exploration diary, emerges the indistinct image that inhabits our brains at the precise moment when we cease, for a very short time, to be men, and through the erotic grace of the senses we penetrate a universe of delirium, moans, and kisses. It is, in effect, the acquired knowledge of a new Olympus.

(And we can well begin to use this word, because it is stripped of all religious meaning.) The gods deprived of unjust and arbitrary prerogatives are not, incidentally, very human beings (but will we be any more so?) and we have a way of understanding them perfectly and fighting with them.

[Robert Desnos]